I remember when I was younger, I used to play street hockey a lot outside. It was great because my parents lived on a street that was basically just a big donut and led nowhere, so no cars would disturb my buddy and I. As I got a bit older, I got very interested by computers and started playing around with them, doing basic stuff like gaming, surfing (56k, yes) and listening to music. I remember very well during this time that not many girls of my age shared my passion for the binary world, to the point where I can recall having taken this “computer programming” class in high school and it had only one girl in it, the weirdest one of the whole school obviously. As I got older, I slowly stopped playing street hockey, and spent more time swapping hardware of my PII computer, and still not that many girls seemed to be riding the digital wave I was surfing on. Let me say that this time was the early 2000’s, so there was an incredible amount of things going on in the Internet world.

Fast-forward five or six years, here I am in university and guess what: I’m sitting in my Art History class trying to figure out why Duchamp reversed his urinal, and the three retarded girls in front of me are playing Facebook Tetris against each other on the school’s wireless network, using their 2500$ Mac Power Books (if only they were doing 3DS Max at least…). Staring of them for a minute made me realize something though, they were really good.

Apparently this is also true now for younger kids. The new generation of children can operate a computer easily and schedule the maintenance scan before they even enroll for kindergarten. The big difference with what happened when I was a kid is that there are things of interest for girls now, especially online. Eight year-olds can shop for all the latest trends and fashion from their homes, and get mom to ship it to their place. Social networking games and interactive Barbie portals seemed to have understood that girls are also using these tools, and in many cases even more than guys. Girls generally have a longer attention span, and can concentrate on many things at once better than guys, who are typically more prone to get distracted at a younger age. I remember earlier this year, I had a roommate who stayed at our place to sublet my friend’s room for a few months, and the days when she wasn’t in school or hanging out with friends, she would be on the computer browsing youtube/facebook/hotmail/msn/twitter/etc. all day. I think it’s safe to say that girls have firmly taken their place in adopting the new digital technologies in the past few years.

Now, Chrome’s share of the market is still fairly low (3% at the time of writing this), but I expect it to grow very fast in the years and even months to come, given Google’s omnipresence in the digital kingdom. Because their search engine was so successful, they managed to introduce a ton of new free products that only made the company more popular. I think the same thing will happen with Chrome soon (like Google maps or Images), especially that they are launching a new OS soon (just announced this week on their blog).

I’ve been using Chrome for many months now, and it’s quite a feat. I’ve been a very very loyal IE user since I know computers for the simple reason that everyone uses it, and since I develop Web applications, I want to know exactly what people will be seeing. what made me switch was speed. Not speed to load webpages (which has mostly to do with connexion speed), but speed to load itself. When I clicked the IE button, it always took 3-4 seconds to load, especially IE 7 and 8, and we all know that 3-4 seconds in Internet time is many light-years of regular time. I use two big flat screens to work, every piece of software is configured and hotkeyed to my liking and I can type very, very fast. Needless to say 3-4 seconds is too long.

When I click my Chrome button, it opens up NOW. It actually doesn’t give me the time to ponder if clicking it was a good decision, because it’s already asking me where I want to go. Saves a few more seconds right there, how convenient. It can read my mind, definitively.

I think we can all agree that Chrome also looks very simple with its minimal design and light theme. But from what I know, most browsers (including Chrome), are very complex once you pop the hood. Yet, all the inner workings are hidden, just to make sure we don’t have to worry about the code crunching that’s going on to display the requested page. Elegant hm? It might be doing a million evil things in your back, but you will never know, just because you don’t need to.

In comparison, Internet Explorer loves to burp out an incoherent ExceptionHandler message at any given opportunity, making you wonder where it got its manners. It’s big, it’s clunky, and it’s slow. And although I’ve been criticizing IE a lot, Firefox is actually very very slow recently, I think they might of caught the Adobe Syndrome (you know, this thing where you need a octo-core computer with 16 gigs of ram to crop the picture of your grandma in CS4?). Even my friends on Macs tell me they can’t stand the Fox anymore and they want a new browser.

One last thing about Chrome. When you go to places it actually remembers. Not only it remembers in the way where it helps you auto-fill the URL box when you type an address, but it also 1) makes the difference between a site that you’ve been to eight hundred times and only once, and it indexes whatever was in the page, so you can just type normal words and it finds the URL for you 2) when you go back to a old tab you just closed (or a page in your history) it also remembers the pages you went just before, so you’re not stuck in that same page wondering why time suddenly stopped when you were on it.

Given my description, I really feel that girls wanting to use a browser will choose Chrome over the others, if they know it exists (which is the problem right now). I think they will identify much more strongly than with IE , Firefox or something else.

Actually, not only do I think Chrome will appeal much to the masses of technologically literate girls, I think Google made it as a girl (consciously or not) – and props to them, it was a great move.